Moon landing!
Kamal Lodaya, Bengaluru

NASA's Artemis 1 spacecraft was due to take off from Cape Kennedy in Florida, USA, at the end of August. (The launch has been postponed by a few days). It will go to the Moon. After it reaches there, a Crew module will separate from the Service module which will remain orbiting the Moon. The Crew module will land on the Moon. After operations there, it will take off from the Moon and rejoin the orbiting Service module. The spacecraft will then head back to Earth. It will re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and splash-down in the Pacific Ocean.
Doesn't this sound very familiar? Didn't Neil Armstrong, Edwin Aldrin and Michael Collins do this in the Apollo 11 program in July 1969? Well, yes, but in 2022 there will only be three mannequins (so no human beings) who will do all this.
In fact, the Greek goddess Artemis was the god Apollo's twin sister. Artemis 1 is a test mission for NASA. It will check out all the technologies which will be used for a human landing. If everything goes well, in 2025 another Artemis mission will indeed take astronauts back to the Moon. NASA has selected 12 male and 12 female crew members as candidates for training. It is expected that 2025 will see the first woman astronaut on the Moon.
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Note: The Artemis program is a robotic and human moon exploration program led by the United States space agency, NASA, and involving three other partner agencies: European Space Agency (ESA), Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA), and Canadian Space Agency (CSA). If successful, the Artemis program will reestablish a human presence on the Moon for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The major components of the program are the Space Launch System (SLS), Orion spacecraft, Lunar Gateway space station and the commercial Human Landing Systems, including Starship HLS. The long-term vision of the program is to establish a permanent base camp on the Moon and facilitate human missions to Mars.
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Picture source: NASA